Interestingly, despite being trumped as a much ballyhooed savior for magazines, it seems few Americans regularly use a tablet to browse their favorite magazines (10 percent or less across age groups).

Nonetheless, the findings point to a mobile future for reading.

As we discussed last week, books and magazines are the fastest growing mobile content category by audience growth. News is the fourth largest content category by audience size and continues to show significant audience growth.

Whether mobile growth in news and books will be able to make up for lost offline or desktop-based revenue is another question. E-books typically cost much less than their print counterparts, for example. However, for ad-supported content, the huge growth in tablets sales should be welcome news because tablets are a much more promising ad platform than smartphones.

A new study by Flurry, a mobile-analytics company, shows that usage of mobile apps is rapidly catching up with television.

Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf reports that the company has tracked a total of a trillion “events”—actions inside apps like finishing a game level or making a restaurant reservation. Those numbers have grown exponentially in the past two years.

All those taps and swipes translate to a significant amount of usage.

In the US, time spent on the Web has stagnated at 70 minutes per day. Television watching has grown slightly, from 162 minutes to 168 minutes. But app usage has almost doubled from 66 minutes to 127 minutes a day. At current growth rates, it should catch up with television within a year.

This isn’t necessarily bad for television content producers, Khalaf notes, who are increasingly adapting their shows to be watched alongside a tablet or smartphone—the “second screen” phenomenon.

“We believe that, with the introduction of connected TVs, TV shows will behave like apps,” he writes.

Companies have big plans to use social tools as innovation platforms, details a new study [download page] from the IBM Institute for Business Value. Among companies experienced in social innovation activities, 57% now use social business for internal collaboration, but that number will reach 78% over the next 2 years. Similarly, while 58% now monitor […]

“It’s all very nice being a digital leader, but do you make more money?” According to a recent study from Capgemini Consulting and MIT’s Center For Digital Business, the answer is yes, to the tune of a 26 percent increase in profitability.

According to Didier Bonnet, Capgemini’s Global Practice manager, what distinguishes these companies is an intense focus on transforming in one area that they’re best at, getting it right, and then applying those lessons and data throughout the rest of the business.

These companies see digital technology as the thing that sets them apart, not just another tool. It’s not an experiment, but an intensely focused program based on getting business results.

“They were very focused to start with in their investment,” Bonnet says, “so rather than just going all over the place and investing in, you know, people, collaboration, customer experience, and operations, they had a pretty clear starting point.”

But that starting point can be very different depending on the company, as Bonnet highlighted with these two digital outperformers from the report:

Burberry: Starting with the customer

“For example, Burberry, the fashion retailer, really started with customer experience, they first tried to get their shop sorted out very well, they put screens in that connected all of the shops to the head office. From there, they moved on to slightly more sophisticated social media applications where they actually launch their collection on soc! ial medi a first before they’re at the Milan or Paris shows. From there they moved on to mobility, and now they’re right in the middle of using all of the data for analytic purposes that they’ve managed to gather from connecting their organization. But it started from the customer experience.”

Burberry took the customer experience, invested heavily, then used that data and experience across every channel. Bonnet says “it’s the difference between sticking a technology in an existing process, substitution if you will, versus really transforming the process with the power of what the technology can do.”

Caesars: Using data to make everything personal

“Caesars has really started on analytics, so they tried to really work on how to personalize the experience for the customer. Once the analytics were sorted out, they moved into mobility with location based marketing, eventually reaching a point where you can get recognized when you walk into a store and get preference based coupons and advice on what you can do in the resorts and the casinos. Now they’re moving more and more into the operations side.”

Caesars’ business encompasses shopping, restaurants, casinos, and more. Starting with data from their customers allowed them to take every other tool digital technology has to offer and use it to boost performance across all parts of the company.

According to the recent study, based on 2.3 million views by 6.7 million unique users, users will start abandoning “short” videos after two seconds, and that 20 percent have moved on after five seconds. As far as the study is concerned, “short” equals “less than 30 minutes,” so you can probably imagine the migration happens even faster when you’re talking about a one or two minute clip. Viewers waiting for longer flicks (probably films) are willing to put up with a lot more BS.

This mass buffering exodus isn’t the same across the board however. A user’s patience also depends on the type of network they’re using. Fiber, Cable, and DSL users are all pretty similarly impatient, but mobile users are far more likely to wait around staring at the buffering animation like a chump, which isn’t all too surprising.

Where do you stand on the Internet video waiting game? Does two seconds sound like an instant, or more like an eternity? [GigaOM]

When we last checked in on one of Sandvine’s traffic studies, Netflix had just edged past BitTorrent as the largest source of internet traffic in North America while YouTube was still a small-timer. A year has made quite the difference. Netflix is up to 28.8 percent in a new study, while YouTube has moved up to second place with 13.1 percent and demands even more than ordinary web requests. Rivals like Hulu don’t register in the top 10, and YouTube is by far the ruler of mobile with nearly 31 percent of smartphone traffic headed its way. Overall usage is moving up rapidly, no matter what kind of network the continent uses — the typical North American chews up 659MB per month when mobile and a hefty 51GB through a landline. There’s little reason to dispute worries of the impact on bandwidth-strained internet providers, although we suspect most would disagree with Sandvine on what’s to be done. The company naturally sees the study as a chance for business with carriers wanting to curb usage or charge extra through its tools; a generation that grew up with internet access, however, would likely see it as a better excuse to roll out more capacity for all those streaming videos.

Netflix utterly dominates online-video traffic, according to a new study by Sandvine, accounting for 33 percent of peak traffic in North America. Amazon, its closest rival, has only 1.8 percent, and Hulu has 1.4 percent.

The real alternative to Netflix is BitTorrent, a popular file-sharing protocol through which users upload and download copies of movies and TV shows. Because it’s a technology for file sharing rather than a centralized service or piece of software, BitTorrent has proven very hard for movie studios to shut down.

But BitTorrent is down to 12 percent of all traffic in North America. It’s easy to see why: With Netflix’s wide selection, relatively low monthly price compared to cable-TV subscriptions, and speed of delivery, few people opt to wrestle with the complexity and delay of file downloads.

In Europe, BitTorrent is at 16 percent of traffic, and in Asia, where video services are less available, it’s 36 percent.

It’s not a given that BitTorrent use indicates illegal downloading of a video file—some game developers use it to distribute legal copies of their software, for example—but it is heavily used for video downloads.

7 in 10 American mothers with children up to 12 years old make recommendations about brands, products and services to other mothers at least monthly, according to [download page] a study released October 2012 by The 360PR MomSquad and Mom It Forward. Fully half make brand recommendations daily. But what motivates them to recommend? Some […]

Netflix’s video streaming service already counts 36% of U.S. tablet owners as subscribers, according to a recent Morgan Stanleystudy.

The bank’s AlphaWise survey of over 1,100 tablet owners also found that over 40% of respondents said they never had Netflix. That translates to over 27 million U.S. tablet owners who have never subscribed and could be targeted for further growth. Also, 19% of the tablet owners said they had cancelled their Netflix, and 3% said they switched to Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service.

Two years after the iPad’s launch, sizable opportunities still abound in the tablet market, even in a fairly exploited niche like video. Morgan Stanley’s survey also reveals how new entrants like Prime Instant Video, introduced in early 2011, can quickly begin to nip at the heels of market leaders. Subscription video exploiting more narrow subjects (performing arts or sports, for example) will likely also find room to grow.

Not exactly a huge surprise here, but a new study out from NPD DisplaySearch today has confirmed that the trend towards larger screens in continuing at a steady pace in all but a few key areas. The big exception is “mobile PCs,” which NPD defines as laptops and tablets for its purposes. That area dropped from a 13.6-inch average in 2010 to 12.1-inch in 2012 (with an ever so slight increase to 12.2-inches projected for 2013), a drop that represents a ten percent decrease overall and is largely attributed to the growth of tablets . All other areas have seen small to significant growth in recent years, with LCD TVs growing 9 percent, mobile phones increasing 38 percent, and portable media players jumping 29 percent. The biggest growth, by far, comes in OLED TVs, which have gone from a mere 15-inch average in 2010 to an average of 55-inches today — a growth of 267 percent.

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.